That Said (3 page)

(dressed in Marimekko) who excused

herself (she needed to pee) and set

her sloshing cocktail glass on the floor.

And before anyone could stop him,

Pickwick was lapping up her martini

like water, the olive too. Then that

scruffy knee-high mutt, who'd breezed

through puppyhood without a whine,

barked—a loud rusty hinge of a bark—

which shocked us into silence, mainly

Pickwick, who, recoiling from the report,

ricocheted around the room, frantic

to see where the noise had come from.

In the short weeks that followed,

Pickwick was a regular bar mitzvah boy

belting out his Torah portion. He barked

at what normal dogs all bark at:

doorbells, strangers, sirens, thunder,

his bowl of kibble twice a day. He growled

if you took his bowl away, howled

when other dogs within earshot howled,

igniting the poodle on the second floor.

By Easter, Pickwick was barking in long,

rhythmic stanzas that kept me awake

at night. I couldn't sleep, couldn't write.

But excited dogs love to bark, and if

you yell at them to stop, they think

that you're barking right back at them,

and they only bark harder and louder,

so I didn't shout or pound on the wall,

or bother asking Elzbieta to shush him,

but suffered with earplugs until another

apartment on a different floor was free.

Like a poet finding his voice,

once Pickwick started barking,

nothing could make him stop.

After Mom died we all worried about him,

alone in the apartment above the store.

But every day he took a three-mile walk.

Learned to meditate. Watched what he ate.

Phoned every Sunday to report the usual.

One Sunday in March, he called, excited,

as if Perrier was running through his veins.

On his walk in the park that day a squirrel

was blocking the path right in front of him.

It had somehow gotten one of those plastic

thingamajig rings that holds a six-pack

together stuck around its neck like a yoke.

The squirrel looked as if it was asking for

help, so my father bent down and flipped

that whatchamacallit over its head

and freed it. The squirrel stood a minute

as if studying him, then scampered across

the busy traffic circle into the woods.

 

The next night, Monday, he called again.

Not an emergency, he was quick to say.

Today in the park he saw that cockamamie

squirrel standing directly in his path,

waiting to thank him! Was he deranged?

Maybe solitude was finally getting to him

or he needed a medication changed.

What a story, I said, but really,

how could the squirrel tell my father

from all the other walkers on the path?

By his scarf? His mustache? His smell?

And how did my father know it was

that same squirrel? Don't get too close,

 

I said. Next time, you could get rabies!

He was a harrowing five-hour drive away.

I could just see him on his rounds that day,

telling Kenny at the deli his new best story

and Jack the bank teller and Henry and

people at the ShopRite waiting in line

beside
National Enquirer
s and
TV Guide
s—

perfect strangers, nodding, agreeing

with him about the strangeness of life.

It's like that Aesop's fable where a slave

named Androcles removes a thorn

from a lion's paw. The moral?

“Gratitude is the sign of noble souls,

be they human or animal.” That winter,

my father died. Along with everything

else about him, I miss his Sunday calls.

Gratitude's reciprocal: my father saves

a squirrel and the squirrel gives my father

a story to tell.

My husband gets a forwarded postcard in the mail

from Temple Beth Israel: it asks him

 

to light a Yahrzeit memorial candle

for his (
beloved father Larry
)

on the evening of (
January 14
)—

the blanks for name and date, in parentheses,

filled in with blue ballpoint ink.

 

I don't want to see my husband's face

when he reads it.

I never met my father-in-law.

He never met our daughter,

his granddaughter.

 

A year ago my husband flew to the funeral in Ohio.

He sat shiva at his uncle's house,

with strangers—his father's friends and business associates,

and buddies his father played poker with

every Friday night for the last twenty years.

 

Tomorrow's the 14th.

There's not a candle in the house.

My husband's working, out of town.

I'll have to go to the Grand Union's Jewish shelf,

where they keep the matzoh meal and kasha,

to buy a Yahrzeit candle.

 

His father walked out on his wife

of thirty years, stole the family savings, cleaned out

the safe-deposit box, disappeared

to another state for two decades,

his whereabouts a blank. Apparently

he found a girlfriend, a house, a job, another life.

 

Every morning for the last ten years,

he ate breakfast at McDonald's

with his best friend, Sol.

Sol told my husband,

“You could have knocked me over with a feather.

In the whole time I knew him,

your father never once mentioned

that he had a son.”

 

Four sons. My husband's brothers

all written out of their father's will.

 

The obituary arrived a week after the funeral:

The deceased has no immediate survivors.

 

My husband will be home in plenty of time

to light the candle at sundown.

But he's ambivalent.

Guilty if he lights it.

Guilty if he doesn't.

The first of the dolls she asked for

was Addy, a Negro slave escaped from the Civil War.

Addy arrived at Emma's sixth birthday party

wearing her historically accurate dress,

drawers, stockings, cap-toed boots,

and carrying a paperback copy of
Meet Addy
.

But Addy's kerchief, her “half-dime

from Uncle Solomon,” her cowry shell,

her authentic Underground Railroad maps

and what the catalogue calls “the traditional

family recipe for sweet potato pudding,”

and the hardcover book—
they
cost extra.

Our daughter didn't get them, and she didn't get

the wooden hobnailed trunk to store them in.

 

Catalogues were coming every month now.

We didn't want to spoil her,

but on Emma's seventh birthday

a Victorian orphan joined the family:

Samantha, who'd lived in a mansion and slept

in an easy-to-assemble brass-plated four-poster bed.

Samantha let Emma remove her checked

taffeta dress, and slip her into her pink, lace-

ruffled nightgown and matching bloomers,

and tuck her into her bed—

on the floor at the foot of Emma's bed—

beside Addy's authentic rope bed,

which cost more than any
actual
Addy's
actual
bed

would have cost, if Addy'd
actually
had one.

 

The next morning, poring over the catalogue,

Addy and Samantha started fighting

just as real sisters do.

Fought over who should wear the Kwanzaa outfit,

who would wear the genuine sterling silver

Star-of-David necklace,

tearing each other's hair out over

the red silk Chinese pajamas, and who'd get to keep

the brass gong and pretend firecrackers

after the Chinese New Year's celebration was over.

They fought over the ballerina tutu,

hula skirt, Girl Scout uniform,

items introduced to the catalogue

when the “American Girl of Today” was born.

 

For her eighth birthday, Emma's father and I

custom-made ourselves a “Girl of Today.”

We chose from (blonde, red, brunette, black)

(straight or kinky) hair to brush

and braid, wash and set, chose

her eye color and skin tone from the

(Hispanic-American, African-American,

Asian-American, Caucasian) models shown,

and created a brown-eyed, brown-haired,

huggable, “unique one-of-a-kind original.”

Just like Emma, our own little girl.

The minute she got her new doll, Emma

named it Emma, and typed “Emma's Life Story”

on her mini make-believe Mac.

 

But soon Emma grew tired of “Emma,”

as she'd grown tired of her other “girls,”

leaving them on their respective beds,

where they closed their variously shaded brown eyes

and slept the half-sleep of the undead—

toys on their way to becoming heirlooms—